Design of Multi-Antenna System for UMTS Clamshell Mobile Phones with Ground Plane Effects Considerations

In this paper, the influence of the ground plane dimensions on the port-to-port isolation of two closely-spaced Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) Planar Inverted-F Antennas (PIFAs) with and without neutralization line is first presented. Parametric studies show the existence of an optimal size of the ground plane allowing optimizing the isolation and the efficiency of the considered antenna-system. The results obtained with this study are used in the second part to develop an efficient neutralized multi-antenna system for clamshell-type mobile phones. The obtained results, in terms of isolation, matching and diversity for the two possible configurations of the clamshell system in use namely the open and the closed states, show that good performance are obtained in the open state and preserved in the closed state. Prototypes of these two configurations are realized and measurement results are in good agreement with the simulations.